
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 15 min 57 sec ago
NVIDIA Ampere GA103 Support For Nouveau Being Sent In For Linux 6.0
As part of today's "drm-misc-fixes" pull request, NVIDIA Ampere GA103 GPU support is set to be added to the Nouveau DRM driver with Linux 6.0...
Real-Time "PREEMPT_RT" Work Down To Just 50 Patches Atop Linux 6.0-rc1
Following Sunday's release of Linux 6.0-rc1, yesterday saw the release of 6.0-rc1-rt1 as the set of patches for providing real-time kernel support atop the upstream code-base. There is just roughly 50 patches to go until the PREEMPT_RT functionality is mainlined!..
OpenSUSE Developers Continue Discussing x86_64 Microarchitecture Feature Levels
Ahead of the upcoming openSUSE/SUSE Adaptable Linux Platform (ALP), whether to raise the x86_64 micro-architecture feature level required by the Linux OS continues to be evaluated and what options there are for making use of newer x86_64 instruction set extensions without necessarily forcing tightened CPU requirements / eliminating old hardware support...
Lenovo Yoga C630 Snapdragon Laptop Seeing Fresh Linux Improvements
When it comes to Linux on Arm laptops the recent excitement has been around the Asahi Linux porting work for the Apple M2 MacBooks and Linux 6.0 supporting the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen3 and the flagship Lenovo ThinkPad X13s Arm laptop. Launched a few years ago though was the Lenovo Yoga C630 powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 850 and thanks now to the work of Linaro that older Arm laptop is seeing Linux support improvements...
LZ4 v1.9.4 Achieves 20~70% Speedups For Some CPUs & Configurations
LZ4 v1.9.4 is out today as the first point release in nearly two years for this BSD-licensed, speedy, lossless compression algorithm...
Qualcomm Posts "QAIC" DRM Accelerator Driver For Linux
After Qualcomm announced their Cloud AI 100 Accelerator back in 2019, in 2020 during the early days of the pandemic they posted a Linux driver for this accelerator. That driver didn't get picked up for the mainline Linux kernel and two years later there still is little fanfare around the Qualcomm AI Cloud Accelerator hardware. However, now they have posted a new Linux driver that goes the DRM driver route...
Android 13 Sources Released To AOSP
Google announced today that the Android 13 sources have been published to the Android Open-Source Project as part of officially releasing this newest version of Android...
GNOME 43 Beta Released With More GTK 4 Porting, Other Desktop Improvements
The beta of GNOME 43 is now available for testing ahead of the stable release next month...
Linux 6.0 Supporting New Intel/AMD Hardware, Performance Improvements & Much More
Yesterday marked the release of Linux 6.0-rc1 and as such the merge window is no over and no more feature work is set to land in this kernel version. Here is my write-up of all the interesting new features and changes/improvements coming for Linux 6.0.
Greg KH Recommends Avoiding Alder Lake Laptops - Intel Webcam Linux Driver Long Ways Out
Greg Kroah-Hartman as the Linux kernel's stable maintainer and effectively Linus Torvalds' second-in-command has suggested avoiding Intel Alder Lake laptops. While much of the Alder Lake laptop support for Linux is in good shape, the exception is around web cameras. These newer laptops with Intel's latest web-camera tech are not currently supported by the mainline kernel and require proprietary software for use. Some platforms like Ubuntu and ChromeOS are picking up these blobs for now while a proper open-source, upstream solution is likely months -- or likely about one year -- away...
AMD P-State Patches Updated But Miss The Linux 6.0 Merge Window
AMD today sent out revised patches for improving the AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling Linux driver that aims to provide better power efficiency than the generic ACPI CPUFreq driver that has long been relied upon for AMD processors...
Intel's oneAPI Support Appears To Be In Good Shape For Blender 3.3
Less than one month away is the release of Blender 3.3 and it looks like Intel's initial oneAPI GPU acceleration is ready and in decent shape for Windows and Linux...
MGLRU v14 Released For Improving Linux Low-Memory Performance
While Linux 6.0 will bring a lot of shiny new features, Multi-Gen LRU (MGLRU) is one of the anticipated changes that isn't going to land now until Linux 6.1. But in the interim, MGLRU v14 was posted today that re-bases the code against 6.0-rc1 to help facilitate more testing of this kernel change that primarily helps Linux systems under memory pressure...
Linux 6.0-rc1 Released With Exciting Performance Optimizations, New Hardware Support
After the two week long merge window, Linus Torvalds this afternoon released the first release candidate of Linux 6.0. Over the next roughly two months the Linux 6.0 kernel will stabilize but already from my early testing on various systems it is in nice shape and the features and performance are looking great...
Intel Xeon Platinum 8380 Performance Is Looking Great For Linux 6.0
Not only is the AMD EPYC performance looking real good for Linux 6.0, but many of the scheduler changes and common kernel improvements also carry over well for Intel's Xeon Platinum 8380 "Ice Lake" server processors too. For your viewing pleasure this weekend are some initial benchmarks looking at Linux 5.19 stable compared to Linux 6.0 Git as we approach the end of the merge window...
Ubuntu Linux Preparing systemd-hwe To Ease OEM Hardware Enablement
Being prepared for Ubuntu 22.10 and presumably will be back-ported in future Ubuntu 22.04 LTS point releases is the systemd-hwe package to more easily deal with updated hardware rules as part of new device enablement...
Wine-Staging 7.15 Released - Currently At 536 Patches Atop Upstream Wine
Following yesterday's belated release of Wine 7.15, Wine-Staging 7.15 is now available that continues to carry hundreds of extra testing/experimental patches atop upstream Wine for bug fixes and other features to empower Windows games and applications on Linux...
Glibc 2.36 Dropping DT_HASH Has Been Breaking Easy Anti Cheat Games With Steam Play
Those on rolling-release Linux distributions that are quick to adapt to new toolchain updates are finding Easy Anti Cheat (EAC) enabled games breaking when running on the recently released Glibc 2.36. The breakage stems from the DT_HASH section being dropped in GNU C Library but EAC being among the few software still expecting that section rather than DT_GNU_HASH...
Wine 7.15 Adds RSA Encryption, Direct2D Command Lists
Wine 7.15 is out a day late as the newest development snapshot of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms. Wine is also what serves as the base for Valve's Proton that powers Steam Play...
AMD Radeon 680M Graphics Benchmarks Across Various Linux Kernel, Mesa Versions
With the Ryzen 6000 "Rembrandt" mobile processors most exciting about these Zen 3+ SoCs has been the energy efficiency improvements and moving from Vega to RDNA2 graphics as with the Radeon 680M found on the Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U that I have been running many Linux benchmarks on over the past several weeks. For those wondering if it pays off moving to a newer Linux kernel or Mesa version with Radeon 680M integrated graphics, here are some reference benchmarks I recently conducted...